


HALF-LIFE

by Mikkeneko



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Firefly
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-01 22:50:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4037557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/Mikkeneko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They all have their own reasons for coming on board, and they all have their own reasons for staying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	HALF-LIFE

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Reikah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reikah/gifts).



  
Every one of them swears they're getting off at the next station.

If it ever happened, this would leave Hawke in a lot of trouble; a captain alone isn't enough to fly a ship, no matter how devastatingly good-looking a captain he is. But he's not worried; they've been saying the same thing ever since they first came on board, and none of them has made good on it yet.

For some of them, that's been years of just-one-more-jobs. Take Aveline, who's been here for the start: they signed on the ship together, pooling the last of their money and the meager scraps of their good credit in order to secure the then-junker that was the least-bad option out of the salvage yard. They hadn't had much choice; fleeing together from the wreckage of Felderan, with the Reaver horde eating up the cities behind them: Ostagar, Lothering, Denerim...

The ship would be the first image to pop up when researching the description of "totalled," but it still flew. It flew them out of there, leaving behind mangled cities and blood-soaked ground and too much grief between them. So many who hadn't made it out, except in memories; Hawke's parents, his sister, Aveline's husband, her children. With the walls of the ship creaking around them every time they changed accelerations, they jokingly named it The Hanged Man: dead already, but still twitching.

Aveline has a new beau now, that they like to take turns teasing her about him: Donnic, the space traffic controller at Kirkwall Station. She keeps talking about retiring there, picking up the settled domestic life again, yet somehow she never does. After all, if she left, then who would be there to guard Hawke's back the next time he's on the run from the customs police from another deal gone bad?  
  


* * *

 

It's thanks to Merril, mostly, that the ship ever really became spaceworthy at all. Merril too talks about getting off at the next station, but Hawke's not worried; she loves ships, she loves _this_  ship, too much to leave, no matter how wistfully she talks about the feel of bare earth on her toes. Dalish women aren't supposed to be engineers, she admitted to Hawke once in a very small voice; she was laughed out of one mechanics shop after another until she finally found Hawke, whose engine had been smoking green for the last five days and who would take anyone who knew one end of a polarity from the other.

She's yet to find another berth, or a school that will take her, one that can overlook her gender and her coloring and her criminal record to see the genius who can make something out of a pile of rusted scraps and electronic refuse. In the meantime she grows little potted flowers in her room that drop leaves and petals all over the friction matting, watches each new blue and green planet they approach with hungry eyes, and stays.

 

* * *

 

Fenris swears every time they dock that he's not spending another fucking day in this rust-bucket. It's not that he has somewhere he wants to return to -- Fenris just hates space. He really, really hates space. He's the only elf Hawke has ever met who actually gets motionsick in a steadily accelerating spacecraft. He hates the ship, ugly and baremetal and constantly near to breaking down; he hates the cramped, comfortless quarters in which he makes his nest; he hates the taste of the recycled water ("you guys know you're drinking your own piss, right?") and he hates the tasteless, processed food. Most of all, Fenris insists quite vocally, he hates all of the rest of them more than anything.  
  
Yet every port they come to, the moment any local bruiser tries to pick on Merril or talk shit to Hawke, Fenris is there to bend the offending hand back at the wrist until bones snap and the police are called, and the debacle ends with yet another port at which Fenris has been blacklisted.  
  
He'll grumpily say, afterwards, that he hates the ship and everyone on it, but so far the rest of the galaxy is just too stupid to bear.  
  


* * *

 

The only one who's managed to get blacklisted from more ports than Fenris is Isabela, and that's only because she had a head start. Unlike Fenris, she doesn't hate space -- she _lives_  for space. She had a ship of her own, once, and she never passes up an opportunity to remind you that she'll have one again. With every new job she talks about how this will be the one, that the cut of her profits from _this_  haul will finally be enough to make a down payment on a ship of her own and then sayonara, suckers.

Yet as every station shrinks in the rearview portscreen she's still on board somehow, and claims she lost her share at cards, or buying new toys, or drinking all night, and if you try to question her too closely she'll claim a hangover and threaten to throw up on your shoes. (She'll do it, too. Fenris found out the hard way.)

Hawke is glad to have her, because where else can he find a pilot who can safely navigate them through an asteroid field? ("Hawke, the asteroids in the densest part of the belt are still two thousand kilometers apart." "EVEN SO!")  
  


* * *

 

Truth be told, they'd probably be blacklisted from every port if not for Varric's presence on the ship. Of the lot of them, he's the only one with any kind of a modicum of respectability -- the author of a bestselling series of exotic erotica, including 'Hard in High Lab' and 'The Sirens of Zeta Centauri' -- and thus the only one actually welcomed in regular society.

For the last two years he's been on a book tour promoting his latest novel, 'The Conquistadors of Uranus' ("But there's nobody living on Uranus... it's a gas giant!" "We know, Merrill." "Oh... I missed something dirty again, didn't I?") but everyone knows that he could be traveling in style on the finest cruise ship the solar system has to offer, if he chose. He claims that the trouble _this_ lot get into give him more inspiration than endless bland hotels ever could, and he plans to go back home and write it all up in a new book someday soon.

So far, someday has never arrived.  
  


* * *

 

And then there's Anders.

Anders constantly talks about leaving, too (never shuts up about it, to be honest) but not because there's somewhere else he'd rather be -- quite the opposite. He knows -- they all know -- that it's Anders' presence on the Hanged Man that draws a giant crosshairs on their hull with every Chantry planet they visit, one of the most-wanted men in the inner solar system. He talks about leaving because his very presence on the ship puts them all at risk, and he knows it.

Anders grew up in the inner Hub on Calenhad -- screened early on for his talents, he was taken into the Circle Academy and trained there. Sheltered, protected, guarded (but never free,) Anders grew to be the most brilliant healer Calenhad had ever seen, and they made good use of his talents in developing medical technology the likes of which the outer worlds could never dream of.

But that all ended when Anders was assigned to an experimental project -- so secret and classified that when he entered it, his entire record was wiped out of existence. In that experiment, he met _something_  else -- something the Chant had discovered, captured, and brought back to study and exploit. A revolutionary new AI, or a spark of alien intelligence transcending the very bonds of matter -- nobody is quite sure, because the entire lab and all its records were obliterated in a flash of soundless plasma on the day Anders made his escape.

He brought something with him -- some _one_ , to be more accurate, because even if the rest of the crew aren't sure what 'Justice' is, none of them can deny that he is real, he is alive, and he -- just like the rest of them -- deserves to be free. And if the closest he can come to freedom is living double in Anders' head while he flees across the galaxy from their pursuers, well, nobody ever said the world was perfect.

Every time a Chantry ship crosses their viewscreen, Anders gets nervous and quiet and huddles into himself, and then begins talking (again) about how he'll leave at the next port. And every time, Hawke manages to convince him that they need him too much for him to leave -- their only doctor, in a lifestyle that's far too dangerous to go without one, and what would they do the next time the coolant line breaks and covers the living quarters with freon burns?

And Merrill protests that her engineering work could _never_  be that shoddy, and Fenris shudders and glares at the thought, and Isabela laughs and brags that _her_  ship never had this problem. And they pull Anders back for another round of Asteroids, another mug of synthetic alcohol, another night crowded into the single bed in the Captain's cabin, and Anders stays another day.

 

* * *

 

 

They'll leave someday, Hawke knows. Nothing is forever, not in the world they live in. Everything is in a constant state of change -- every second, another isotope ticks away, spending its energy in a hopeless heat exchange while it slowly decays into dull inertness. Flowers grow, bloom, get old and die; even stars die someday.

But not today.

  
~end


End file.
